NEW: Trump Nominee Expected To Cruise To Confirmation With Democrat Support
While Republican senators have expressed confidence that all or most of President-elect Donald Trump’s cabinet nominees will be confirmed, Elise Stefanik is expected to cruise to confirmation with support from a number of Senate Democrats. The outgoing New York congresswoman was nominated to serve as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations just a few days after Trump’s November election victory.
Stefanik, who served as the third-most senior member of the House before her nomination, garnered national attention by pushing back against pro-Palestine protests on college campuses last year. The New York Republican grilled presidents of Ivy League universities for allowing weeks-long protests that contained violent rhetoric towards Jews and pro-Israel students.
In one particularly explosive hearing, Stefanik pressed former Harvard University President Claudine Gay, who was ultimately forced to resign due to plagiarism allegations. The congresswoman listed a number of specific examples, including a number of Harvard students who were calling for an “intifada” or chanted “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.”
“You understand that the use of the term intifada in the context of the Israeli-Arab conflict is indeed a call for violent armed resistance against the state of Israel, including violence against civilians and the genocide of Jews,” Stefanik asked Gay, who refused to condemn the rhetoric.
Stefanik (left) presses Gay during the tense December 2023 hearing
Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-MI), who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told The Hill that she is open to supporting Stefanik after her confirmation hearing next week. Duckworth’s openness to supporting Stefanik marks a sharp deviation from her posture towards Defense Department nominee Pete Hegseth and Justice Department nominee Pam Bondi during their respective confirmation hearings earlier this week.
“She made it very clear that she was accessible and she wasn’t walking away from the United Nations,” Duckworth the outlet. “I thought it was good she said she would engage with the U.N. and really take on the role.”
President-elect Trump was often critical of the United Nations during his first term. In 2018, he instructed then-UN Ambassador Nikki Haley to withdraw from the body’s Human Rights Council due to its inclusion of authoritarian regimes and refusal to accurately call out human rights abuses.
In withdrawing from the council, Haley stated that the U.S. had given the human rights body “opportunity after opportunity” to make changes. She sharply criticized the council for “its chronic bias against Israel” and pointed to the fact that it includes known human rights abusers such as China, Cuba, Venezuela and the Democratic Republic of Congo. “We take this step because our commitment does not allow us to remain a part of a hypocritical and self-serving organization that makes a mockery of human rights,” Haley said.
Trump later ordered a U.S. withdrawal from the World Health Organization in 2020 due to the body’s inconsistent COVID-19 guidelines.
As Democrats are typically more supportive of UN efforts, Duckworth and other Senate Democrats are reportedly satisfied with Stefanik’s positions on continued cooperation. Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) is another Democrat who has offered his tacit support to Stefanik pending the outcome of her confirmation hearing.
“I’m nervous a little bit about how [Trump] would approach some of these international organizations. Can they be frustrating? Yes. But when the U.S. disengages, it gets worse, not better for us. So I’m nervous about that,” Kaine said, adding that his meeting with Stefanik was “good” and “substantial.”
If confirmed, Stefanik has vowed to hold the UN to account on the various issues that plagued Trump’s first term, calling it a “cesspool of antisemitism” in a September op-ed for the Washington Examiner. “As the largest financial contributor to the U.N., the U.S. must present the U.N. with a choice: reform this broken system and return it to the beacon of peace and freedom the world needs it to be, or continue down this antisemitic path without the support of American taxpayers,” Stefanik wrote.
The outgoing congresswoman is not expected to face any Republican opposition to her confirmation, though support from Democrats could speed up the process. Stefanik is currently scheduled to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 21.